The Angry Bald Man’s Hospital Adventure

I just finished taking a shower. This may come as a surprise to those of you who regularly question my personal hygiene. The rest of you may wonder why such a mundane matter is worth writing about.

What made this shower so special is that it’s the first one I’ve taken since having surgery four days ago. I have a condition in my right shoulder called osteolysis, which was causing my clavicle to impact my acromium, causing my differential to downshift into my humerus. Or something like that. Anyway, this shoulder problem had been causing me pain for almost a year, especially whenever I’d hoist a heavy beer stein or flip the bird to a group of Tea Partyers. After months of suffering and whining and some useless physical therapy, I consented to having surgery, which involved the removal of the tip of my right distal clavicle—whatever that means. All I know is that the drugs were good.

My orthopedist did the surgery arthroscopically, which apparently means he used a teeny Fisher Price probe thingy that has a camera on it. He made four small incisions, did his business, and then stitched me up, leaving my shoulder looking as if it had a rough sexual encounter with a miniature porcupine. Even though my surgery was fairly minor, I was dreading it. In my opinion, anything involving the words “hospital,” “general anesthesia,” “consent form,” and “which shoulder is it again?” should be viewed with abject terror. Plus, I have this strange aversion to pain.

Hospitals conjure up all my worst fears: being helpless, depending on strangers, and seeing people wearing floral print scrubs. To add to my worries, I had no significant other to hang around during my surgery to make sure I didn’t come out with breast implants or minus a kidney.

The day before going under the knife, I went to my orthopedist’s office so that he could tell me what to expect post-surgery, and mark his initials on my right arm. When I got home, I wrote “NOT THIS ARM, STUPID!” on my left one.

On the big day, my friend Rene dropped me off at the hospital at 5:00. In the morning. There are only two things one should be doing at that time of day, and neither of them involves having surgery. I was oddly calm and unworried, which may have been thanks to the marijuana I smoked when I first got up—which I might add, I use strictly for medicinal purposes.

Once I signed over my mortgage and my liver, I was officially admitted. A young nurse led me to a tiny room where I was given a gown and drawstring pants to change into. Pants! I felt more optimistic already. The last time I was in a hospital, I had to parade around in one of those stupid open-backed gowns with my ass hanging out. Clearly medical science had made major strides since then. I stowed my clothes and my eyeglasses in a plastic bag and the nurse took it away, presumably to be burned if I died on the operating table.

During the next hour, various members of my "medical team" stopped by to introduce themselves as members of my medical team. Without my eyeglasses, it was simply a parade of animated blurs. I became uneasy as one person after another the same tentative question: “So we’re working on your… right shoulder today?”

“Right!” I’d say. “I mean, correct. Correct and right. Not the left one! The right one! Read my arms!”

Finally the anesthesiologist dropped by. I was glad to see her, even though technically I couldn’t. She started explaining my options regarding anesthesia. “What we recommend for maximum pain prevention is called a nerve block. It—“

“Okay,” I said.

“Um, if successful, it can totally block pain for anywhere from about twelve to—“

“Sold!” I said. “Let’s do it!”

“There’s a slight risk—“

“No problem! C’mon.”

“But sometimes—“

“I’m ready!” I smiled and bared my neck to her, like someone eagerly awaiting his vampire lover’s bite.

Ten minutes later, the nerve block was in place, and I felt nothing in my shoulder. Nothing at all. All was well. The parade of smiling, helpful people continued. Everyone there was so friendly and helpful—until it was time to go to the operating room. Apparently we were running late, because the young lady who steered my gurney there drove it like a race car, careering around corners and at one point losing control of it so that it spun sideways and momentarily blocked the hallway. She righted it, came close to smashing it into a huge support pillar, and then almost collided with a gurney coming from the opposite direction.

“Shee-it!” she said. “I hope I don’t run into one of them guys coming from the ER. They think they own the place. They be sayin' it’s my fault again.”

Again? “I hope you don’t run into anyone, either… especially with me on board,” I chuckled nervously.

“I ain’t worried about you,” said the Danica Patrick of the OR. “I don’t wanna lose my job.”

Finally we came screeching to a halt in the OR. I was clumsily transferred to the surgical bed, and Danica burned rubber taking the transport gurney to its next stop on the hospital NASCAR circuit. I lay beneath the array of surgical lights, feeling like an extra on “Grey’s Anatomy.” I was hoping Katherine Heigl would stroll in.

Here my recollection starts to get fuzzy. I vaguely remember a gas mask being strapped around my face, and someone saying, “Take some deep breaths.”

“It’s my right shoulder,” I struggled to say, but I’m not sure they heard me.

# # #

Someone was calling my name.

“Are you awake? You need to wake up, honey,” a twangy female voice said. My throat was terribly sore from being intubated and I couldn’t quite fill my lungs with air. I felt a burning pain in my right shoulder and my bladder was filled to bursting. And I was freezing cold. I thought I’d died and they’d stuck me in the morgue.

“Are you in pain?” The nurse leaned in close. She was fifty-something, wore big glasses and had a calm, kind face.

Somehow they’d managed to disconnect my tongue from my brain.

“Burning pain,” I said, doing my best Incredible Hulk impression and pointing to my shoulder with my good hand.

“OK,” she said. “We’ll take care of it.” Seconds later she stuck a needle into the IV in my arm. Pain go away. Hulk glad.

The nurse told me to cough and breathe deep, cough and breathe deep. She asked how I was doing. I told her I needed to pee.

“Can you wait until we get you into a room?” she asked.

“How long?” Hulk asked.

“Could be another hour,” she said.

“Nuh-uh,” said Hulk.

“OK,” she said. “I’ll get you a urinal.”

She handed me the “urinal,” which looked like a plastic juice container, and helped maneuver it under the bedsheet and my gown, drew the curtains around my bed and stepped outside. I noticed the pants I so highly valued were now missing.

Now, an admission: I have a mild case of paruresis, also known as bashful bladder syndrome. This means I have difficulty urinating when other people are in close proximity. I don’t know why. If I’m at a urinal in a public restroom and someone walks in and stands next to me, my bladder sounds the retreat, closes for business and shyly retreats to its room. I have no control over this. If I’m already in mid-stream (as it were), I’m usually okay.

At that moment my bashful bladder really wasn’t on my mind. I was way too sedated to feel self-conscious or inhibited at all. And I had some degree of privacy, except for the one-foot gap in the curtain at my feet, through which I could see a young woman in her own bed about 20 feet away, possibly watching me trying to pee into an orange juice container, or lying there unconscious. I really couldn’t see.

And yet I couldn’t urinate. As I lay there straining to empty my bursting bladder, nothing happened. Nothing. Nada.

After several minutes, the nurse said, “Everything okay in there?”

“Can’t go,” I said.

“Hmmm,” she said. “It’s hard to go lying down. How about if we stand you up? Water runs easier downhill.”

She unhooked me from several tubes. That’s when I realized that I looked like a supervillain from a low-budget Spiderman movie: There was a bulky bandage on my shoulder, over which was strapped another bulky device with two hoses running to it that kept ice water circulating around my upper arm, an IV drip, and a catheter to feed pain meds straight into my shoulder joint. Spiderman, meet Dr. Tripodopus.

The nurse helped me to my feet. She stood next to me holding onto my left arm to keep me from toppling over. Nothing like togetherness. She turned her head away and started fiddling with the monitors attached to me, trying to look busy. I tried again to pee. Nobody’s looking, I told myself, and this woman is a professional. I took a deep breath, straining to get the proper muscles working. The various monitoring devices attached to me started sounding alarms. The harder I strained, the more it sounded like a nuclear meltdown was imminent. I could feel people staring at the curtain wondering if I were going to die or explode.

“Ignore that,” the nurse said, flipping switches while holding on to my arm. I repeatedly inhaled and strained. More beeps and alarms. It was getting quite musical in here. At last, I felt a trickle begin, but it immediately stopped. I tried different techniques. Inhale and relax. Inhale and picture gentle rushing stream. Hold breath and strain. Mentally chant, “We’re number one! We’re number one!” Finally, exhausted and lightheaded, I gave up.

“All I can do,” I said, handing the nurse the juice container, which now contained approximately one ounce of urine.

“Sometimes the anesthesia can make it hard to go,” the nurse said. “Maybe you’ll do better once you have a room.”

“Uh,” Hulk said. As the nurse helped me lay back down, they wheeled in a large sheet-covered mammal and parked it next to me. It was snoring like a blue whale—or how I imagine a blue whale would sound if blue whales snored. It was a thunderous, rattling sound like an industrial vacuum gone haywire. Soon it would suck us all into its massive nostrils.

Poor guy, I thought. “Wake up,” another nurse told the snoring thing. “Wake up, Tracy Lynn, honey.”

# # #

Finally I was taken to a tiny room—more like a booth—of my own. Another ice-cold room. Apparently hospitals don’t believe in refrigerators, so they keep the entire building cold enough to store meat in.

A pretty young nurse came in and introduced herself as Amy. As she checked my vital signs, I told her of my urgent need to relieve myself. She escorted me to the cavernous restroom about 20 feet away, while I took unsteady old-man steps beside her. Once again I tried and tried to go, until finally… someone opened the floodgates of Hoover Dam. Anyone within a hundred yards must’ve thought that someone had turned on a firehose in an echo chamber. I spent about five minutes emptying my bladder. I felt like I’d just drained the Eerie Canal.

She walked me back to my tiny room, which was smaller than the restroom. I felt surprisingly good, fairly alert, in no pain at all. My right arm was completely numb and useless, and I couldn’t even wiggle my fingers.

Nurse Amy brought me graham crackers and a cup of water. I chewed a cracker, which instantly absorbed the last remaining molecule of saliva in my mouth. I felt like I’d just stuck a handful of sawdust in my pie hole. I managed to wash it down with the water, which tasted more refreshing than anything had ever tasted before. I was really hungry so I ate more crackers, nearly choking to death on each one.

My friend Jay walked in—my ride home. I tried to crack a joke around my mouthful of sawdust. Jay nodded and smiled politely, pretending to understand me.

Another nurse popped in and gave me final instructions that I wouldn’t remember and had Jay sign some papers for me. At last I was free to go. Now came the hard part. With my right arm being number than Paris Hilton’s skull and more useless than Glenn Beck at a health care debate, I couldn’t dress myself, and lovely Nurse Amy wasn’t volunteering to help. That meant Jay would have to help me. In situations like this, you get to know who your friends really are.

We removed my hospital garments, and I sat on the edge of my chair clutching the gown to my naked groin, wearing only my supervillain apparatus. I realized that never before in my adult life had I needed another man’s help to get dressed. I felt helpless and somehow embarrassed.

Jay had fished my underwear out of the plastic bag and was holding them for me to step into. I hesitated.

“Hey, no worries,” Jay said. So I tossed the gown aside and took one small step for a man, and one giant leap for leaving behind my stubborn pride.

Did I mention that the room was really, really cold?

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